Introduction

The main purpose of this visualization exercise is to illustrate China’s coal plants natural retirement patterns. That is, assuming China is not constructing any more new coal-fired power plants and all coal plants were to live up to its full planned lifetime, what does China’s coal-fired power generation capacity trajectory look like?

All the the plots here are made using GEM’s Coal Power Plants Tracker.

Historical Retirement patterns

To estimate the trajectory of coal generation capacity, it is imperative to inspect the historical retirement records. To this end, I first select only the retired plants and plot out the relationship between plant operation start time and plant lifetime.

Curiously, there is a significant linear relationship between operation start year and the lifespan of coal-fired power plants. This strong association can be attributed to China’s slew of campaigns targeting at small coal plants to address overcapacity problems. One regulatory document issued in 2005 that heralds these retirement and restructuring campaigns is the Decision of the State Council on Promulgating the “Interim Provisions on Promoting Industrial Structure Adjustment” for Implementation, which highlighted China’s pressing needs to “build large-type coal bases, adjust and transform medium and small coal mines, firmly eliminate the small coal mines failing to meet work safety conditions and wasting or destroying resources.” To see how these policies are affecting the retirement of coal-fired power plants, I plotted the histogram of coal plant retirement over time:

Indeed, starting from 2005, there is a sudden increase in the amount of retired coal plants; many smaller plants were shut down before their planned retirement are due.

Natural coal plants phaseout trajectory

This section aims to summarize the coal generation capacity trajectory under the natural phaseout assumption. That is, no new coal plants will be constructed unless the plant is currently under construction or already acquired permits. These sets of graphs are made to gauge how much early retirement and retrofitting efforts are required to achieve carbon neutrality under different planned lifetime schemes.

As we can see, in the more realistic lifetime scenarios of 30 years and 40 years, natural phaseout is not satisfactory per se. In my future work, I will identify retrofitting and retirement capacity of each province.

Note: In part to address some missing data, some assumptions are made to produce these three plots above.

1. All plants under construction will complete construction, assuming it will take five years.
2. Planned lifetime is only applied to plants without known planned retirement date.
3. For coal plants that are permitted yet haven’t started their construction, a 5-10 years pre-construction period is assigned randomly before entering the construction phase.
4. Given the strong linear relationship explored in previous section, lifetime of those plants whose retirement year is unknown is predicted using their operation start year.
5. Cancelled, shelved, pre-permit, mothballed, and announced projects, as well as operating plants with no starting and retirement years are all not considered in the visualization exercises.